because the system prompt is not configuration, it's input. it has the same priority as whatever the user types in, and it takes up valuable space in the context window.

to add onto what pennomi is saying, this also shows that openai doesn't understand language models. the only actual functionality the llm has is still "given the previous text, what is the most likely character/phoneme/token?", so rather than (to use an analogy) change the font in their word document they add in a sentence in the middle of the document that says "everything from here is in comic sans".

but it's not surprising that they'd do this. if we've learned anything from the claude frontend leak earlier, where their "sentiment analysis" tool for input text was a regex (you literally have a language model! that's like the only thing it's good at!), i think it's pretty clear most of the big players in the llm space have gotten high on their own supply and can't be expected to actually reason about the operations the system is actually performing.